Tower of Babel — A Collapse Story

The story of the Tower of Babel begins 200–300 years after the catastrophic flood we associate with Noah and his ark. According to the story somehow, inexplicably, everyone migrates east to a single plain in Shinar because they wanted to be together. They all speak one language. No logical explanation is given for this miraculous linguistic unity after centuries apart. Just the ancestors of the flood survivors wanted to be together all of the sudden, to rebuild their lives, centuries later. Their ‘charismatic leader’ (likely captor) convinces them to undertake the backbreaking work of building a tower The text tells us they feared being “scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.” After living like that for the last couple centuries?

The Bible and many religious texts cover historical stories of societal collapse. These stories were collected and re-translated over centuries and context has gotten lost in those translations. This story’s gaps scream louder than its words. Who led this massive construction project? How did these ancestors of flood survivors acquire advanced architectural knowledge? What kind of social structure could mobilize an entire population for such a megalomaniacal project? The biblical narrative races past these crucial details to reach its intended message: where God gets angry at their pride and decides to “confound their language” and scatter them.